Sensibilité prussienne, 1960

CommentaryThe call for a reduction of visual tools, as expressed by the artists’ group ZERO, is particularly evident in this early work by Otto Piene. The artists of the group initially focused on white and black in protest against the dominance of informal and expressive painting. Piene attempted to facilitate an articulation of light on the surface of the image. His first grid pictures were created in the late nineteen-fifties. In ›Sensibilité prussienne‹ (Prussian Sensibility), Piene applied small ridges to the canvas in a gridded structure along a horizontal line. The spacing is always the same but the thickness of the ridges varies, which allows light to flicker across the gridded surface. »The emanating light of color in paintings flows between the work and the spectator and fills the space between them,« wrote Otto Piene in 1958 in an issue of the programmatic magazine ›ZERO‹.